Having already gone on tour with Gang of Four just weeks earlier, Men, Women & Children are playing it on a fan by fan basis. While diehard Glassjaw devotees are already aware that the band features Todd Weinstock, these relative newcomers are out to establish themselves as a forceful and separate entity, proving that great music can survive even without a "featuring ex-members of..." sticker mandatorily brandishing the cover.

While in a van, still on the road from their current tour, Men, Women, & Children's keyboardist/programmer, Nick Conceller, took a break from watching cornfields pass by and answered a few questions.

Nick Conceller: Yo, man.

Drew Ailes: Hey, how are you doing?

NC: Pretty good, what's going on?

DA: Not a lot, not a lot. Just trying to distract my cat from compulsively shitting.

NC: [laughing] Yeah, yeah, that digging out of the litter box thing?

DA: Yeah, he won't leave it alone. He's just a kitten, and I understand he's bored, but there's got to be less fecal-oriented ways to entertain himself.

NC: Get him some catnip, dude. He'll be high.

DA: That's what I'm thinking.

NC: Where are you located?

DA: I'm in North Carolina.

NC: Oh, we were just there, man. You should've came to the show.

DA: Yeah, I know. I didn't even know you were here until I just pulled up the website. I've been really busy, so I haven't had the chance to keep up on things.

NC: We had a good night, it was fun there.

DA: Did a lot of kids come out?

NC: Yeah. It was like, on the Gang of Four tour, no one really knew who we were. We had some kids that saw us before, but a few of them drove from Baltimore. It was kind of weird, but it was cool.

DA: So how were the rest of the shows with Gang of Four?

NC: They were awesome, man. I think maybe sixteen or seventeen shows and the dudes in the band were extremely cool. They loved our music. The crowd was hit or miss. We had some really, really, good shows, and then some shows where we played well but the crowd just stood there. Because no one's ever heard us. Our music is a little overwhelming if you haven't ever heard it before. But I mean, we did good. We sold a good amount of merch for what it was, and we were singing onstage with Gang of Four, and we did a Parliament cover one night.

DA: Which cover?

NC: It was "Flashlight". There were like, ten of us on stage. It was really fun.

DA: How did you end up on the tour with Gang of Four anyway?

NC: I think we just submitted for the tour and they...I don't even know if they heard it or not, but we heard we submitted for it, and it was like doing this interview, they just told us we got the tour and we freaked out. It was the perfect tour for our first big one.

DA: So you guys are just leaving Kansas or just coming into Kansas?

NC: We're headed into Lawrence, Kansas, right now. We have two shows left. We're playing in St. Louis tomorrow. That's my hometown so it should be good.

DA: And that's the last show?

NC: Yeah, and then we're headed back to New York.

DA: Are you happy that the tour is coming to a close or are you just grateful to have survived through it?

NC: Well, yeah. It's been a long tour, dude. Our van got broken into in Baltimore, eight days into our tour. We drove 500 miles with no window. We wrecked some electronic stuff on stage, and that was in my laptop, so it felt like a longer tour than it really has been.

DA: How much got taken from you?

NC: It was a laptop and a firewire drive. That's it. There were Ipods all over the van. It was pretty crazy. That's all they took.

DA: They probably didn't know what the hell it was.

NC: Yeah, I know.

DA: A friend of mine got robbed once at gunpoint. He was selling drugs and these guys came over and robbed him, and he had all this brand new stuff that was insured and everything, so he didn't really give a shit if they stole it. But they didn't take it. Instead, they took a Culligan water bottle full of change and forced him to carry it out to their van, at gunpoint.

NC: They didn't steal his weed or anything?

Well, yeah, they did, and whatever money was around. But they could've taken a new computer and some other recording equipment. Apparently they just really wanted that Culligan water bottle full of change.

NC: That's really weird.

DA: I guess there's a reason people rob other people. They're incapable of getting a job everywhere.

NC: And they want rush, like, "I'm gonna go rob someone."

DA: That's probably a big part of it, yeah.

NC: I used to steal shit when I was in junior high.

DA: Yeah, me too. Maybe we shouldn't talk about this on tape, though.

NC: Hah, yeah.

DA: I'll still make sure there's no contact information available for either of us. So when does the new album come out, and what is it titled?

NC: It's self-titled, and right now we're looking at February. Hopefully, mid-February. Everything's done, the label just needs proper set-up time. We want to get on tour and just have everything in motion when the record comes out. I hope it comes out soon. We don't want to wait that much longer because I feel like, as people see us, they get into the music and will buy it at the shows and stuff.

DA: Yeah, there's a certain amount of time before they'll just forget about you and three years later, wonder if you ever put out an album.

NC: Yeah, yeah, I don't want to be like Guns N' Roses.

DA: Well, I mean, in some aspects I wish you were Guns N' Roses.

NC: Yeah, me too.

DA: No matter who I was talking to, I would probably say that. Basically, you need Slash.

NC: We tried to have Slash come on our record, but it didn't work out.

DA: Really? Was he too busy trying to recover his giant stolen hat?

NC: Oh, his hat got stolen?

DA: Yeah, you didn't hear about that? I guess it didn't make the headlines or anything, but yeah, someone stole his giant trademark hat.

NC: Wow, that's crazy.

DA: That's a lot different than getting your laptop and firewire drive stolen.

NC: That's a lot worse.

DA: That takes guts.

NC: He's gonna find the dude someday.

DA: It's probably just some kid sitting in his basement, wearing it, playing the air guitar and laughing.

NC: He'll probably get stoned and lose it one day, too.

DA: Yeah, heh. "Damn it! Where's Slash's hat?"

[laughing]

DA: I know you mentioned Todd was involved in Glassjaw. What bands did everyone come from, and are there any bands that anyone is also involved in?

NC: Right now, everyone's only currently involved in this band. Everyone kind of was just in different bands that were never really of the same magnitude. Todd knew all of us just from being around, kind of, so that's where we started. Nothing crazy.

DA: Well, how did the show go that you did in New York with Jesse Lacey of Brand New fame, and how did he enter the equation?

NC: I guess besides me, all the dudes in the band, they grew up in Long Island. That scene is kind of like, everyone knows everyone. Our singer, TJ has been a great friend of Jesse's for a while now, and Todd actually went on tour with Brand New and played bass, maybe two years ago. As we were making demos for the record, Jesse and all those dudes were the few people that heard the music, and every time we played them something, they got excited. So they've been big up on us from day one. They're an awesome band and cool dudes. So, when we did our Long Island show, which was our first, and we played New York City on a Friday and Long Island on a Saturday, and we thought it'd be cool to have Jesse DJ. And he was into it. Kind of a logical step, for us.

DA: Does he already do DJ work?

NC: No, I think that's the first time he's ever DJ'd in his whole life. But he was sick. He had his Itunes and some records, and was just playing some cool stuff. It was fun. We did a big production for that show, it was really cool, we had fun.

DA: Yeah, I've heard you guys have a pretty entertaining live show.

NC: Yeah, I mean, we just want the live show to be fun. Everyone goes to work, and work sucks, and just everything sucks at least if you come to our show and pay your ten bucks, you should have fun for an hour or a half-hour. Our friend, Dan, we got this little light contraption, he does lights. We wanted to make it like a concert. You go to shows and dudes are just staring at their feet, looking all depressed, and we like

DA: Force them to get into it.

NC: Yeah. The band was kind of started to be the complete opposite of that. Like, let's go out and have fun. I don't know. Every aspect is hopefully fun when people see it.

DA: I've read that the band formed under the pretense of exactly what you said, having fun, but was that something that you intended to go forth with or just sort of play in it once and a while...?

NC: This band? This band is for the long run. It's not a side-project at all. When we started, we had no idea. I was living in St. Louis at the time. Every one of us had our own thing going on. It was really supposed to be, "ah, we'll just do this for a month and we'll throw it out on the internet," and I would go back to St. Louis and Todd would go back to Glassjaw. But it would be fun, and funny. But then we wrote a few songs and everyone was like, "whoa, that's kind of cool," and at one point we decided just to drop everything else. Once we decided that, we were in a room for like, fifteen hours a day, for really, up until the first tour we did. It was super intense. It was fun. Everyone's influences are so vast and different, that it kind of turned out to when you listen to the record, you can feel where every dude is coming from. And that's kind of why it is what it is.

DA: Where are you all actually coming from?

NC: I mean, I don't know. You'd have to open our CD book. It's just the widest variety of stuff. Everyone's really into mainly a lot of older stuff, but just like, funk music, jazz music, hip-hop just everything. I've never been around a bunch of people that the first thing we do when we get somewhere is go to the record store. Even before we eat, we're like, "yo, lets go get some records."

DA: So it's just a combined effort of a whole bunch of music junkies.

NC: Yeah, scenes. And that's what's cool about being on tour. Whoever is driving gets to be the DJ and just play whatever we want, and we're all forced to listen to it. In a good way, though.

DA: Do you ever find that what you're listening to the most is what influences your writing?

NC: I mean, yeah, I wouldn't say drastically but there's definitely points in time on the record when you look back on it, maybe not the riffs or anything specific, but it has a similar vibe. Once we started writing, we didn't really hear a lot of stuff because we were so busy in the studio and in the rehearsal space. It was almost like everything we knew to that point, before, and when we started writing and it was just relying on what you heard.

DA: So how does the writing work for you guys? Does everyone just bring different parts and blend them together?

NC: Kind of. This band is different because it'll be the four of us and we'll just sit in the room together and someone will come up with a main idea. Every part is hashed out as a full band. We demo everything in Pro-Tools, and we write the songs as a rock band and then put the electronics and keyboards and stuff, and then we deliver the song to TJ, our singer, and he would do his thing and go to the studio. Then we'd analyze the song from there. Some bands it's just one dude who just comes in and has a whole song written. This band has everyone together, always. And that's also where our influences come in. Even if you didn't write the part, you still get your chance to put a spin on it. It's all collaborative. It's really cool.

DA: Does the band provide an ample enough income for you guys to actually live off of, or are you all forced to take second jobs?

NC: It's kind of neither. We've got a little bit of money to live, but we're all just swimming on our credit cards. I'd like to have a job, but it's a 24 hour job, this band. So we're kind of hanging on and getting by how we can. I've been selling a bunch of stuff on Ebay.

DA: Sort of an odd question that you can choose to pass on, because it is potentially a dumb question, but how do you actually feel about men, women, and children? Not the band, but men, women, and children.

NC: Oh, well, I love everyone. You know? It's a universal thing, this band. You're asking how I feel about the people, right? I love everyone and I hate everyone.

DA: Why is that?

NC: I don't know. People are evil. I don't know. Actually, I will tell a story. The day we got robbed, we were all pretty bummed out that everything was gone. That night at a show, it was our first show without playing with any of our electronics, and we told the crowd that we got robbed. After the show, this dude gave us like, 900 bucks and was like, "I feel really bad for you guys, I know what it's like." So that was kind of the offset about the love and hate of all of it. Men, women, and children are all both evil and amazing. It depends on the situation. How would you answer?

DA: How would I answer?

NC: Yeah.

DA: Um, probably about the same. I mean, truthfully, I love everyone, but I just get disappointed in people, I guess. I used to think that I hated everybody, but that's not it. I realized that I just have a lot of high expectations for people because I think that they're capable of more.

NC: Definitely.

DA: I guess that's what it is.

NC: Yeah, and it's like, you just have to do your part. That's all you can do. And when you know you're doing your part, it sucks when other people flip it and take advantage of it.

DA: There's this guy I know, and he does all these really good things for people, but all he does is talk about it. It almost nullifies the fact that he does all these good things.

NC: Right, if you're a good person, you really don't have to say anything on it.

DA: It just seems like he's trying to qualify himself constantly by talking about what he's done.

NC: It's like, a dude that's a bad-ass and can beat up everyone, he doesn't say it, he just know he can.

DA: Or, have you ever seen the movie, Fear Of A Black Planet?

NC: Yeah, I have.

DA: You remember in the beginning where they're talking about how they don't have to front where they're from, because it'd be like a dude with a big dick bragging that he can fuck for hours?

NC: Yeah, totally.

DA: It's the same thing. He doesn't need to.

NC: Because he just does it.

DA: He just does it.

NC: Yep. That's my philosophy in life, right there.

DA: That's good, I'm glad we can trace that back to such a quality flick. Not that many people have seen that. It's better than CB4.

NC: Yeah, that's the shit. That movie wrecks CB4 by far.

DA: I managed to find the soundtrack on cassette. We'd drive around in my friend's van without a CD player. We had that and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 soundtrack.

NC: With Vanilla Ice?

DA: Yeah, I think, and with that Tarzan Boy song. [singing] Oh-oh-oh-wee-oh-wee-oh-wee-oh-ahhh-oh-oh-ah!

NC: [Laughing] Amazing, dude.

DA: And usually we'd be hungover and going to get breakfast. So we'd be as unenergetic as possible while listening to this super upbeat song. Well, anyway. I'm glad we got that question out of the way.

NC: Yeah, that was a good question. I don't know how you're going to write or phrase any of this, but at least we're in deep.

DA: Moving on, given the amount of bands who have recently embraced the sort of electronic and dance-oriented brand of rock, are there any fears that you guys have of being lumped into a certain category and disregarded?

NC: Yeah, I mean, we've definitely talked about that. I think when you hear our music, there's many elements to it. If you hear other bands in that genre, that's the only thing they can do. This band, I feel like we could go out on tour with Gang of Four, Brand New, or something like The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Maroon 5. I feel like we have a different sound. It's not pigeonholed into one little sector.

DA: There's something that everybody can kind of get out of it.

NC: Yeah, I mean, I hope so. Maybe the record will come out and that will happen. I think just people always want to tag something. I guess I can see why. But we'll see.

DA: What's a style of music you'd like to hear gain more acceptance among mainstream culture?

NC: Maybe music that's more DJ oriented, like Prefuse 73, or Tortoise. More of the creative stuff that when you hear, you think, "I wish everyone understood this." Stuff like Trans Am. More creative stuff.

DA: Don't you do DJ work as well?

NC: Yeah, I do. As we go along, we'll definitely get into doing more remixes and stuff like that.

DA: And you'll spearhead those?

NC: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Maybe the once dance band that I think is pretty cool is !!!.

DA: Have you heard Out Hud?

NC: I haven't heard them yet.

DA: I like them a little better to be honest. I guess I just get more replay value out of it.

NC: I need to pick it up, I haven't heard it yet.

DA: Who is one person that you'd like to see completely disappear from the media?

NC: Tom Cruise, probably.

DA: Why is that?

NC: He's...just getting a little deep on The Church of Scientology. It's a little intense.

DA: What's something that's odd or interesting about the band that not a lot of people would expect?

NC: This band, if you just meet one of us individually, we're pretty mellow, but when you put all of us together, it's the most intense thing. Everything is full-blown. Everyone is so into it. Sometimes we get into it. The band is really intense. Every decision, all the music, I don't know.

DA: How do you mean?

NC: Just...we just get into it. Get heated sometimes. Just because everyone's so into it. It's like being brothers. You could punch your brother in the face, but an hour later, you're drinking a beer together. We're like, the new Oasis.

DA: Oh man. That's a huge throne to claim. I remember one of the brothers said something like...

NC: That they were bigger than the Beatles.

DA: Yeah, they said that, but one of them said in respects to his brother's heroin use that he didn't give a shit if he filled up a bazooka with heroin and shot it up his ass.

NC: Wow. We're not on that level.

DA: You'll get there. What plans for the future does the band have, and is there any chance you'll get to see the European shores again? Didn't you guys already head over to England?

NC: No, we haven't been there yet. We were supposed to go. We will definitely be over in England. I think we're talking the end of January, we've been talking about going over there for a couple of days. We're going to be on tour all next year, hopefully, and just doing remixes. Hopefully we'll spit out some new music. I guess the record has to come out first. We'll get the record out, tour, and just be busy all year. We want people to see the live show.

DA: So you do head to plan somewhere over in Europe?

NC: Definitely. I think we'll be all over the whole world this year. Everywhere. I'm really excited.

DA: Lastly, what have you been listening to lately?

NC: I bought Eric B. & Rakim - Paid In Full, the other day. I just got all five John Frusciante records that just came out. Have you heard any of those?

DA: Only one of them.

NC: They're sick. The band...we've been listening to the new Paul McCartney, which is pretty ill. Gang of Four...this dude Egg Foo Young, that just did a remix for, he's got some awesome stuff. We got Paul Wall - Chopped & Screwed. We've been listening to some Hella and MIA. I just got a couple of Herbie Hancock bootlegs. We got this Stevie Wonder live.

DA: Hey, if you get a chance, you should track down some of those Various Artists CDs of just...great electro.

NC: Yeah, like Cybotron, and like

DA: Yeah! Cybotron, exactly.

NC: I'm big into Mantronix and shit, too. All that 1983 era stuff. I got a Hashim...a bunch of that old vinyl, I'm all about. I was kind of psyched when that new Missy Elliot song came out, because that is a Cybotron song. They just sampled it to the T.

DA: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

NC: We're just happy that people are interested in talking to us. We really just want people to hear us and come to the show. That's how this band is going to stick out and be unique. Thanks a lot for the interview.

Having already gone on tour with Gang of Four just weeks earlier, Men, Women, & Children are playing it on a fan by fan basis. While diehard Glassjaw devotees are already aware that the band features Todd Weinstock, these relative newcomers are out to establish themselves as a forceful and separate entity,...